The boo-box tool was born from a mix of Web Services and ecommerce APIs, links with affiliate codes in HTML, libraries, frameworks and plugins in free code. Without these open source tools we would not have been able to create applications that have been helping over 1,000 content originators to earn more (and more objectively) with what they publish on the web.

In November 2007 we released boo-api, which allows developers to use our infrastructure to search for offers in any of the ecommerce retailers with which we are integrated. Our intention is to develop, for the community, knowledge that we gained using their tools.

» Continue reading “Working together with the developers’ community”

So, how did you do on the test?

What this video really demonstrates is how we tend to not pay attention to secondary matters when our attention is focused on one main subject.

Online advertising has been increasingly treated as a ‘secondary matter’ that has to vie with specific content to grab users’ attention. Flashy banners, pop-ups that block content, sponsored links, such as AdSense; all try to guess what the user is searching for, all vying for space and attention with the content of your web site.

It is inevitable that, just like in the video, these ‘secondary objects’ will be overlooked by the majority of people, or that, in those cases where they do manage to grab attention, they tear the focus away from what’s truly drawing the user: content. (If you had been paying attention to the “moonwalking bear” you probably would have missed the number of passes!)

» Continue reading “Banners, pop-ups, AdSense, SEO and your content”

The nearest mankind has got to an oracle these days are the search engines. They know everything, they answer everything, and if they don’t, it is because the question was not properly formed. Thanks to this unheard of capability, a lot of people use search engines as their start point (pt-pt); therefore, the bulk of internet traffic comes from them. The greatest generator of traffic to blogs, are for instance, search engines.

There is a whole economy that was created around content search engines, and a lot of second-generation Brazilian web startups are dependent on them to create revenue streams. A classic example occurs when content index services from other websites create optimized pages for searches; place ads around the content; and wait for traffic to come from search engines, when the so called “keyword droppers” are going to click unwittingly at ads, generating revenues.

The problem with this business model is that if the search engines change any parameter in its relevance algorithm, the traffic to the service can be severely affected, and the startup can agonize to death. As any beginner knows, it is dangerous to build a business that relies on a company that is not yours.

» Continue reading “Good content need not fear search engines”

Cool your jets, it’s not a malicious virus that is trying to steal your photos! It’s a game that has come up at Campus Party 2008 and it is spreading.

Dozens of people are taking pictures with boo-box’s logo and are showing their support for the company that makes relevant marketing and efficient products recommendation.

Get into it too! Take a picture with boo-box’s logo and put it on Flickr and tag it as boo-virus.

boo-box was conceived to change the way marketing is done today. We want to make marketing more meaningful and elegant and less disruptive and obtrusive. We believe that by empowering publishers we will enable better environment for audience’s and will make marketing a relevant part of content experience.

In order to do that we found out that we needed to go in a different direction than other marketing companies.

For us, real contextual marketing is the one that is deeply co-related with the content it is displayed with, and today, to achieve that level of relevance the only way to go was to adopt natural intelligence in the contextualization process. That’s why we aim at developing the easiest to use tools and procedures that allow publishers to control what is marketed with(in) his content, instead of investing our intelligences in developing algorithms that would try to identify context.

» Continue reading “Relevant marketing”